The October update just replaced the Perino LW's Tripod with a Bipod. Not only does this give the two variants real visual distinction, but I'm thinking we may be getting Tripod buffs in the near future.

Currently you're correct, it's visual only, but going out of their way to change one of them to a Bipod is highly suggestive of an upcoming Tripod-specific buff (Hotchkiss Telescopic and Perino Defensive), which would also serve to make the Defensive statistically relevant.

Buffing Tripods to make them better and distinct has been brought up several times on the CTE reddit and was very well supported, and the weapon designers definitely saw it.

The point is padding out selection of gun choices in the menu because people have been complaining "MOAR GUNZ" since BF1 released. BF4 gives you tons of largely useless weapons and apparently people love false choice.

Shit I didn't buy BF1 until months and months after release specifically because they took away freely chosen attachments and customization.

I'm still kinda miffed about that.

I don't think the customization really did anything. If you wanted the optimal weapon of a certain type you basically had to use canned combinations. There was no "customization", it was basically the variant system but where you assembled the variant yourself.

If you didn't care about optimal performance you were basically using the attachments/other lesser guns as aesthetic bits. Aesthetics confer zero depth. Why not just go the CSGO route and reskin/greeble identical weapons at that point.

The shitty variants of weapons in BF1 we are talking about now are basically cleaned up alternatives of the oodles of shitty choices you could make in BF4.

Actually deep customization would be interesting, but I think that's practically VERY hard to pull off.